The Inside Story of ASML's Focus and Business Strategy With Marc Hijink
The world's semiconductor supply chain relies on ASML, with 90% of all chips manufactured using its machines. How does the Dutch tech giant keep its edge amid rising geopolitical tensions? How has ASML maintained its focus on advancing the industry as the pace of change continues to accelerate? In this episode of Zoom In Zoom Out, Marc Hijink, journalist and author of “Focus: The ASML Way,” discusses how ASML continues to innovate through focus and clear-cut strategy.
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Dutch tech giant ASML makes the machines that power the modern semiconductor industry, with its equipment used to manufacture 90% of the world’s chips. In a conversation with TaiwanPlus’s Zoom In Zoom Out, journalist Marc Hijink, author of Focus: The ASML Way, explained how the company maintains its edge amid supply chain upheavals, global competition and intensifying geopolitical tensions.
Hijink said his deep reporting on ASML began almost by accident during the pandemic. “There was no magic involved, I guess,” he said. “I figured I could spend my time writing about the big tech in the Netherlands, which is ASML. And it was just a lucky shot because they were crazy enough to let me in to interview their leadership and to follow them during the pandemic, but also during the chip shortage.”
The access opened a rare window into a notoriously secretive company. Hijink described how ASML’s leaders initially hesitated but eventually embraced the chance to tell their story. “They had to think about it for a while because for them it was a huge leap of faith as well,” he said. “They also had this urgency to tell their story, because there was a lot of focus on the company itself. And they wanted to share the world what’s driving us? What are the challenges our engineers are facing and what are the challenges our industry is facing?”
At the heart of the story is ASML’s obsession with focus — in its technology, its workforce, and its long-term vision. “It’s focused and focused in in five dimensions,” Hijink said. “Focus in its machine to get to this nanometer size of accuracy… focus on the long term, meaning that ASML has to build chip machines that will be available in 10 or 15 years for the rest of the market.”
The company’s approach has shaped an ecosystem of suppliers and engineers who specialize in the most complex problems in physics, optics and mechatronics. But Hijink noted that focus also brings blind spots. “They don’t like the easy problems. Their engineers crave for very hard problems… and they tend to forget logistics, HR, security, you name them because they are not very interesting problems.”
As artificial intelligence transforms the chip industry, ASML has been adapting. Hijink explained that its lithography machines generate enormous amounts of data that require advanced processing. “At ASML they call this the holistic approach,” he said. “You need more measurements to do better litho… and ASML has been switching to GPUs like Nvidia’s chips because you can use AI models to do better prediction based on patterns you find in huge amounts of data.”
Hijink recalled how former CTO Martin van den Brink viewed AI with both skepticism and pragmatism. “He called it Voodoo Software sometimes because it has a spooky way of making decisions that are very hard to analyze afterwards. And he was more confident of the human approach. But he acknowledged the fact that AI can do things faster.”
For Taiwan, ASML’s path offers parallels. “Let’s start with the resemblance between Taiwan and the Netherlands,” Hijink said. “We’re now tangling between two superpowers, we’re also trading with two superpowers… they want to be neutral players, and which means you can’t give advantages to one of your customers and keep them away from others.”
Both ASML and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) have emerged as monopolists in their fields, shaping a global industry while navigating U.S.–China rivalry. “I think they both feel the responsibility to be the Switzerland of semiconductors,” Hijink said.
Despite the pressures, ASML’s defining trait remains its relentless focus — on precision, on talent, and on the long game. “Behind this chip in your screen or in the conversations you have with ChatGPT,” Hijink said, “there’s a world created by humans.”
